Attempting to Migrate Purchases from a Secondary Account to a Primary, but failing.
So, for more than a decade, I had two appleid's: apple@gushi dot org, and later, when icloud became a thing, I was told that an apple id was an id ending in me.com, so I created one there too.
This worked well, for a long time, but for some reason, things like homepods would always complain of not being able to play my library. At Apple's advice (after many support calls), I started just buying things under my new, all-in-one apple id. Besides, with Apple Music, I didn't have to worry quite as much about my purchases. I copied all my original media out to my new account with iTunes match. I added my old ID to family sharing (also at apple's advice), just so I still had access to things like Movies i had bought.
But there would always be purchases I didn't want to make twice, so I had to remember "oh, right, go into family sharing to watch any movie I bought before 2020 or so". It's only a couple dozen movies. I've even considered just buying them all over again, just to make life simpler, but the principle of the thing annoys me.
Recently, apple provided a way to do this migration, but with a list of prerequisites, detailed in this knowledge base: Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another Apple Account - Apple Support A second KB article covers what exactly happens when you do this, here: About migrating Apple Account purchases between accounts - Apple Support
Naturally, when I tried it, I signed into my old appleid on my current-OS phone...and it failed. With this error:
Like the Backstreet Boys say: TELL ME WHY.
This is a *really terrible error*. It doesn't tell me if this is something I can fix or not. I also suspect that, with this being a new feature, not all the bugs have been worked out. However, I tried reading up on things, and one thing stuck out to me:
There's directly conflicting info between the two KB articles about if the two accounts can have library data associated with them. Have a look:
and
Also, the warning about "You can’t migrate purchases if you’ve set your Apple One subscription to provide iCloud storage to a third, different account." does not make sense. I have the 2TB plan, and my whole family uses it. That's the whole point of the premium plan!
What I *think* is going on here is that this process only exists for people who, up till this point, have *exclusively* only used their "secondary" account for the itunes store and the app store. Not for people like me who made the switch a year or more ago, and are just trying to avoid having to use the "family sharing hack" to continue to have access to their old purchases.
I think apple does not yet support the feature I want: "Merge these two accounts' music and movie libraries, and discard any duplicate purchases".
I'd be grateful to hear of anyone who's had a more positive experience.
There's still one more hole in the process, of course: What happens when a family sharing owner dies? Do all the movies the family has watched and loved together, and all the music they've bought and listened to together just...pop into nothingness?
iPhone 14 Pro Max, iOS 18
